Rhode Island’s I-95 Gateway: Two 102-Foot Signs at TF Green Airport

The ARTfx Observer  |  July 2024

As a key part of a $12 million beautification project, two identical 20-foot tall, 102-foot long monument signs now sit alongside Interstate 95 in Warwick, Rhode Island, marking the gateway to TF Green International Airport. One faces the northbound lane. One faces the southbound lane. Each required approximately 2,400 hours to complete.

For drivers, the signs are the moment Rhode Island officially welcomes them. For ARTfx, they are one of the largest gateway monument projects we’ve ever delivered. Roughly 4,800 hours of design, engineering, fabrication, and installation across two structures that have to look identical and perform identically against the same weather, the same headlights, and the same volume of traffic on one of the busiest stretches of highway in the Northeast. The short video below walks through the build.

What a Gateway Sign Has to Do

A sign that sits beside an interstate has a different brief than a sign that sits in front of a building. Drivers see it for two or three seconds, often at sixty-plus miles per hour, in every weather condition the Northeast can produce. The brand identity has to read at a glance. The architecture has to look intentional from a quarter mile away. And the structure has to survive twenty-plus years of high-velocity wind loads, freeze-thaw cycles, and the constant vibration of nearby traffic.

At 102 feet long and 20 feet tall, these are not signs. They are small buildings. The engineering effort is closer to a piece of infrastructure than a piece of signage, which is exactly why the project required the engineering team at BL Companies working alongside ARTfx’s in-house fabrication engineering.

Two Identical Signs, Two Directions

Building one massive sign is hard. Building two identical signs that stand at different sites and have to read as one coordinated gateway is harder. The structures, the lettering, the lighting characteristics, and the landscape integration all had to match across two separate installations on either side of the highway.

From a driver’s perspective, that consistency is invisible by design. You see “Rhode Island” and “T.F. Green International Airport” rendered the same way, lit the same way, framed by the same landscape strategy, whether you’re heading toward Providence or toward Connecticut. From the fabrication floor, that consistency is a deliberate quality control discipline maintained across every cut, weld, paint pass, and lighting calibration.

Why This Project Took a Team

Infrastructure-scale signage doesn’t get delivered by one company in isolation. The Rhode Island Department of Transportation set the brief and the standards. Manafort Brothers Inc. served as general contractor. BL Companies and ARTfx shared the engineering load. ARTfx handled fabrication and installation across both sites.

Beyond the named partners, there’s the team you don’t see in the credits: the ARTfx administrative coordinators who kept the schedule on track across a 4,800-hour build, the fabrication crew who held tolerances at scale, and the installation team who set 20-foot tall structures alongside live highway traffic. A project like this is the sum of every one of those roles being executed at a high level.

ARTfx thanks Manafort Brothers Inc., the Rhode Island DOT, and most of all, our talented administrative, fabrication, and installation staff for their dedication.